You see, today Portland-based JanRain, one of the old guard in terms of OpenID, unveiled a new service that has the potential to increase OpenID adoption.
How? By focusing not on those people holding an OpenID, but on those who want to allow people to use that OpenID—but simply can’t figure out how.
With this new software-as-a-service solution (that’s a lot of “s”s, isn’t it?), RPX, JanRain has the makings of a service that allows anyone to drop OpenID support—and OAuth support for that matter—into place on their site. Simply and easily.
With RPX you don’t need to become a security expert, a protocol expert, or play through a number of security and data flow problems, RPX handles all of this for you and delivers a simple payload in either JSON or XML.
In my mind, JanRain’s solution has a great deal in common with Will Norris’ brilliant OpenID plugin for WordPress, wp-openid. But for a much larger audience.
With RPX, JanRain has the opportunity to take that same kind of plug-and-play OpenID login concept to the larger Web—beyond blogs—to the companies who could greatly benefit from the technology.
And that’s very cool.
It’s also cool that they could be making some money off of subscription fees to deliver that service.
As an aside, I’m also happy to report that JanRain gains the distinction of being the first Portland company that I got to cover for ReadWriteWeb. And I can’t tell you how great it is to share the amazing tech scene here in Portland on that larger stage.
Well and speaking of that larger stage, JanRain also garnered coverage on a little tech blog of which you may have heard, TechCrunch.
Dare I say “YAY Portland!”? Indeed I do.
Still hungry for more OpenID news? Fear not, gentle reader. A little bird tells me that they’ll be some more cool OpenID stuff being released here in Portland within the next week or so.
Just you wait.